M2M FEATURE NEWS

450 IoT Platforms and Counting

For those who love to follow the ballooning number of platforms enabling connected things, it's going to take you awhile to get through this "structured repository of 450 companies that are offering Internet of Things platforms."

The report is broken down into thirteen industry segments including four in consumer IoT (home, lifestyle, mobility and health) and nine in business/industrial IoT (manufacturing, smart places, energy, mobility, health, supply chain, retail, public services and other).

Manufacturing and Industrial tops the categories with respect to the percentage of the 450 platforms supporting. The report follows platforms in forty different countries, and is published out of Hamburg, Germany in a country known for its leadership in technology including IoT.

Commenting on the updated list, IoT Analytics Managing Director Knud Lasse Lueth said: “The market for IoT Platforms continues to get more crowded and fragmented. However, the dynamics are shifting: while we continue to witness a constant stream of new startups entering this space, most of the larger vendors seem to have made their bets by now – organic new entrants by multinationals are becoming rare."

The analyst firm ranks platforms based on a number of factors, including revenue, customers or members, and level of funding. This go-round feature 41 platform acquisitions, along with 34 inactive platforms, as the category clearly continues to transform based on consolidation and fall out dynamics.

Their taxonomy includes:

Application enablement

Device management

Analytics

Cloud storage

Connectivity backend

Avoiding the Gartner, IDC, Forrester and other large industry analyst firms, IoT Analytics has chosen to build a "boutique" (their own description) and appear to be succeeding based on building large databases and digital services, in addition to publishing and providing strategy consultants from their relatively tight team.

Founded in 2014, their 10 team members have backgrounds in data science, telco, IT, and consulting, and are clearly IoT geeks at heart who have attracted an average of 40,000 visitors per month on average to their website. They have an impressive customer base, including Harvard Business School, IBM, EY, Microsoft, Redhat, Siemens, Bosch, Hitachi and Verizon.

With 450 platforms to track, along with other streams they publish on, they are enjoying "that tme" when a new industry category grows faster than anybody can really keep up with, driving massive fragmentation and eventually consolidating into a manageable number of winners.

The list costs anywhere from $699 - $1,300 US (for one to unlimited user licenses) but you can get free whitepapers, including this one on Industry 4.0, just by contributing your name and email.

Written collectively by Markus Lorenz, Michael Rüßmann, Rainer Strack, Knud Lasse Lueth, and Moritz Bolle, while the paper is dated (Fall of 2015) its a good read on waves of technological advancement and how the workforce of the future will be shaped by digital industrial technologies, including IIoT.

IoT Analytics is not the only firm tracking IoT platforms. BI Business Intelligence, Bain, McKenzie, Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Zinnov Zones and many others are also reporting and forecasting. While we will never get to 450 analyst firms tracking IoT platforms, figuring out the IoT certainly has spawned its own eocystem of analysts who are slicing and dicing the IoT up and providing those of us who are passionate about "this thing" ample thought provocation.